Come along! F----, _make_ her dance." And I was forced to gallopade up and down that verandah till I felt half dead with fatigue.

The boards had a tremendous spring, and the verandah (built by F----, by the way), was very wide and roomy, so it made an excellent ball-room.

As for the trifling difficulty about music, that was supplied by Captain George and Mr.U---- whistling in turn, time being kept by clapping the top and bottom of my silver butter dish together, cymbal-wise.

Oh, dear! It takes my breath away now even to think of those evenings! I see Alice A---- flitting about in her white dress and fern-leaf wreath, dancing like the slender sylph she really was, but never can I forget the odd effect of the gentlemen's feet! No one had their dress boots up at the station, and as Alice and I firmly declined to dance with anybody who wore "Cookham" boots (great heavy things with nails in the soles), they had no other course open to them except to wear their smart slippers.

There were slippers of purple velvet, embroidered with gold; others of blue kid, delicately traced in crimson lines; foxes heads stared at us in startling perspective from a scarlet ground; or black jim-crow figures disported themselves on orange tent-stitch.